Pressing Start and the Games That Never Stop

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Is the iconic button’s absence this generation just for show or is its time of relevance finally over?

By Tim Biggs

How long has it been since a new game asked you to ‘press start to play’?

Putting aside the fact that ‘playing’ is rarely the first thing you do when starting up a game these days (and ‘press start to install updates’, ‘press start to begin setup’ or ‘press start to begin matchmaking’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it), if you’re prompted to press a button at all on Sony or Microsoft’s latest platform it isn’t start.

Of course the removal of a button isn’t the same as the removal of functionality. It’s obvious that the primary functions of the start button – beginning a game and pausing it – can be achieved with any input, and one could mount an argument that the change from start to ‘options’ on PS4 and ‘menu’ on Xbox One is nothing more than a change in name.

Fare thee well sweet start button.

However in my view, now that we’re far enough into the generation to have an initial feel for such things, the ditching of the word ‘start’ — and the corresponding and intentional distance between the new consoles and the old paradigm of the start button — says something about the direction of mainstream gaming. Is it really just that other buttons have taken over, or is it that some of the gameplay philosophies associated with start are no longer relevant?

To answer that question, we need to take a quick look back at why the start button, and consequently the start screen, was there to begin with.

Obviously a big part of the start screen’s origin story can be found in the arcades, where a machine would cycle through various demos and attract screens while nobody was using it. Once a player grabbed the controls or inserted a coin the machine could jump straight to a start screen which it always had resident in its memory, so the player could begin interacting.

Some variety of invader. Possibly from space.

The start button as we know it today, the kind seen on the Nintendo Entertainment System, was an innovation that (in tandem with select) combined this straightforward input verification with the convenience of being able to start and set up your games in any way the software allowed (previous home video game machines had these buttons on the hardware itself, limiting the number of options a developer could institute). The start screen that contained the options and determined how the game would play out would also serve as a safe, user agnostic spot to end up at when you pressed reset (remember reset?).

The need to set options and define parameters before hitting start fell away a long time ago, and by now we’re all used to the ability to access menus in-game and tweak settings on the fly. Yet until recently the start screen remained, and served an important purpose. The more modern start screen is the part of a game that can load up before the program knows how many players are present, which controller they’re using, or which accessories. The act of pressing start is generally enough to answer all these questions and allow the program to load further accordingly.

However a current gen system has the capacity to gather this information (and much more) autonomously. No Xbox One game needs to be told who’s holding the controller, for example, and information like who’s signed in and which controller they’re using can be provided directly by the operating system.

Xbox One can easily tell how many people are playing Fighter Within. (Zero.)

This capacity of the new consoles finally makes the start screen an optional formality and also allows for one of contemporary console gaming’s most important features, namely the ability to have games suspend or continue to work in the background while multitasking. Pop out of the game for a second to keep watching that show on Netflix, from exactly where you left off, and the system will tell you when a Titanfall game’s been found for your party so you can jump back in. If the idea eventually works as gamers, platform-holders and publishers all surely dream it will, each game will only ever need to be ‘started’ once.

Further proof of this can be found in the way we manage our progress through current games. If the old way of doing things was to input a password or select a load file to take you to where you were in a game each time you start it up, the new way of doing things is to have each player’s profile match up with their persistent ‘career’ data: a kind of meta save file that keeps track of what parts of the game you have access to and how. It isn’t a case of needing to tell Titanfall who you are or have it load your progress from a save when you want to continue playing, because what it doesn’t get from your console’s profile it has stored server-side.

And this format is being applied to more and more games, even if they have narrative or a ‘campaign’ at their core. Look at Killzone Shadow Fall or Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, which utilise a splash screen to show your various achievements throughout your career and allow you to replay levels or jump into multiplayer.

Find out how many sharks you've punched before you even get into the game. Sweet.

Starting a new game in the true sense of the phrase isn’t something that’s done often, and it isn’t even technically possible with some games once your gamertag or profile is attached. From the moment you start the game it is always in progress.

And this ‘always on’ philosophy has implications for the second most obvious use of the traditional start button (which is also rapidly decreasing in relevancy): pausing. While more traditional gaming experiences can simply shift pause functionality to the menu or options button, it’s fitting that the start button and its association with pausing should disappear entirely since, frankly, games that you can pause whenever you like are on the decline.

For reasons both financial and fashionable, new games are looking to become just as often online services, just as often multi-user arenas and just as often persistent worlds as they will be single player experiences, as a hallmark of the current gen looks to be communalisation of gameplay to the point where an individual player no longer has the capacity to say when the game should start or when it should pause.

So far we’ve seen this mainly take two forms. First, with the barriers to entry all-but lowered by the acceptance of free-to-play and the PC-like structures of the new consoles, MMOs like DC Universe Online, The Elder Scrolls Online and Final Fantasy XIV look to find a much more comfortable home on PS4 and Xbox One than they could have found on previous consoles. Practically no genre of game could be better suited to the always-online era than the MMORPG.

"Guys, this plan of yours involves a little too much popcorn and Game of Thrones to be effective."

Secondly, we’ve seen the realms of the single player and local multiplayer both shifting across into experimental always-online designs, such as Titanfall and Need for Speed Rivals. Owing to their online nature the game does not start or stop at your discretion but instead offers periodic downtime in the form of lobbies and ‘garages’ respectively.

So farewell, start button. It seemed at first you’d merely been renamed or replaced, but it’s beginning to feel like there truly won’t be a place for you in the future of gaming, where the way games begin, the player’s authority over their progress and the criteria by which they end (if they do at all) will be far less straightforward than it used to be.

Tim is freelance writer based in Sydney who thinks the Nintendo 64 controller has the prettiest start button. Catch up with him on Twitter or here at IGN. And join IGN Australia on Facebook.